"It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be reads by nonpersons - automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happen s to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless test message streams.
Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of computing clouds.
The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of cases.
And yet is is, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.
The words in this book are written for people, not computers.
I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
In the first chapter, subtitle: Fragment Are not People, Lanier opens with:
Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century. The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, isore for machines than people. Nevertheless, it is sometimes referred to as 'open culture.'"
Arrsum. It looks like it's gonna be a decline of civilization narrative. fun!
shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)